rosetta program need to many memory

Yes, the combination of new protocols and challenging proteins has been requiring more memory than previously.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

I see it as a positive thing. It shows real science is being made :D

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I see it as a positive thing. It shows real science is being made :D

And I see it as a big negative. Either BOINC or the Rosetta app that runs under it doesn't know how to play nice when the work units take up 1/2-1 gig of ram each and will bring even a strong performing machine to it's knees with it killing the hard drive using the swap file. Plus, it is not easy to figure out how to stop this behavior in the client. I have pretty much switched my machines off Rosetta because of this, because I will not tolerate an app that I run out of the kindness of my heart and pocket start making my computing experience with the machine be like dog poo. So now my hex core system and another system now are running Seti because the work units from Rosetta were thrashing the hard drives with swap file usage. The hex core has 6 gigs of ram installed and the other machine had 4 gigs of ram installed, so it's not like they didn't have a good amount of ram in either.

The default BOINC Manager settings generally cause BOINC applications to avoid swapping to the page file. The application itself (Rosetta@home) has little control over how memory is handled. It runs at the lowest possible CPU priority to help the operating system understand that other activity is more important.

The way BOINC runs within the memory limits established is that it suspends tasks that push BOINC's total memory usage over the threshold. It then attempts to find another task which might run in less memory. If it cannot find such a task, then BOINC runs less concurrent active tasks, because the BOINC Manager understands how important it is to live within the established memory threshold. This would mean running or only 6 or 7 CPUs when BOINC Manager is configured to use up to all 8.

Some people wish to better balance the optimization of both CPU and memory. For that purpose, I generally recommend attaching to more than one BOINC project. Specifically, one that runs with a smaller memory footprint, such as SETI or WCG. This brings more choices to the BOINC Manager. It will then be able to find other tasks that run in less memory and will tend to keep all of the CPUs you have configured to allow BOINC to use actively running.

If you have questions, please ask.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

I see it as a positive thing. It shows real science is being made :D

And I see it as a big negative. Either BOINC or the Rosetta app that runs under it doesn't know how to play nice when the work units take up 1/2-1 gig of ram each and will bring even a strong performing machine to it's knees with it killing the hard drive using the swap file. Plus, it is not easy to figure out how to stop this behavior in the client. I have pretty much switched my machines off Rosetta because of this, because I will not tolerate an app that I run out of the kindness of my heart and pocket start making my computing experience with the machine be like dog poo. So now my hex core system and another system now are running Seti because the work units from Rosetta were thrashing the hard drives with swap file usage. The hex core has 6 gigs of ram installed and the other machine had 4 gigs of ram installed, so it's not like they didn't have a good amount of ram in either.

Go to my account and then computing preferences and change these settings:
Use at most 75% of page file (swap space)
Use at most
Enforced by version 5.8+ 85% of memory when computer is in use
Use at most
Enforced by version 5.8+ 90% of memory when computer is not in use

Those are my settings and you can compare them to your probably default ones and see the difference. Bigger work units means more work done in less time, time moves forward as must our pc's and their specs. 1gb of ram per cpu is pushing the lowest levels of being enough anymore more.

Yea I put definatley recommend putting swap file usage to lower. I personally have mine all at 50% because I dont want to hurt anything, but I also have 8 gigs minimum of ram on my computers. World Community Grid is nice if you dont have alot of memory. One of my computers im rebuilding only has 4gigs, so it might need to do world community grid till i get some more money.

Ram really is essential and I would rather have to much than to little. But yea reason 8 gig minimum is because thats all those perticular boards could hold, lol.

I'll just make the point that it's not an all or nothing deal on which projects to crunch for. The BOINC Manager will figure out what can run within the memory constraints. I mean if you have 4 CPUs for example and 2 are running R@h and 2 are running a low-memory project, you can still reduce the memory requirement significantly over running all R@h. BOINC settings allow you to establish the resource shares between projects, and that will basically bias BOINC Manager into getting the ratio you desire as to how many of each project run at a time. And for short periods of time, it may run outside of that basic resource share to help accommodate your memory preferences, or to make up time to a project that is currently running in less than it's maximum usage.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

One way to fix the problem is to run Rosetta@home on a certain number of cores, and something less memory intensive on the other cores. I'm doing that on an old computers: 1 core is Rosetta, the other is World Computing Grid doing Proteome at Home.

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@msi!, try running Rosetta@Home, or any other BOINC project for that matter, on a Dell Dimension 4100 /w a PIII processor (running @ 866Mhz) an .5 gig of ram. It's the slowest computer in the house & the rare time that my mom is using is, she doesn't even notice that the darn thing is running slow, because I let BOINC run ALL of the time. <8-)